Translating Foreign Otherness: Cross-Cultural Anxiety in Modern China

182 Pages·2017·1.46 MB·English

by  Yifeng Sun

Translating Foreign Otherness
This book is the first attempt to study and explore the deep-rooted anxiety about
foreign otherness manifest through translation in modern China. It purports to
contextualize and theorize a range of key issues concerning translation practice
as a result of and in response to foreign otherness, which provides fertile sources
for competing ways of thinking. While greatly expanding the Chinese perception
of the world, they pose a threat to the stability of the Chinese self, which is then
questioned and judged in a new light. China has had an uneasy relationship with
the rest of the world, particularly the West, for well over a century. The trans-
formative power of translation can best be outlined and illustrated by making a
central argument about China’s complex relationship with foreign otherness and
identifying and exploring a range of relevant and interrelated aspects of theo-
retical concerns with regard to translation practice. The book is structured to
specifically deal with and develop such interrelated themes in relation to foreign
otherness: authenticity, foreignization, (un)translatability, translational violence,
cultural attitude(s), and the practice of glocalization, all of which are fundamen-
tally related to how translation can function to shape China’s trajectory and inter-
actions with the outside world.
Yifeng Sun is a Professor of Translation Studies, Dean of the Faculty of Arts,
and Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at Lingnan University,
Hong Kong. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland,
Australia, and an Adjunct Chair Professor at Jinan University, China.
Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting
Studies
For a full list of titles in this series, visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-
in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RTS
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Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Case Studies
Edited by Gabriel González Núñez and Reine Meylaerts
24 Translationality
Essays in the Translational-Medical Humanities
Douglas Robinson
25 The Changing Role of the Interpreter
Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards
Edited by Marta Biagini, Michael S. Boyd and Claudia Monacelli
26 Translation in Russian Contexts
Culture, Politics, Identity
Edited by Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt
27 Untranslatability Goes Global
Edited by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan
28 Queering Translation, Translating the Queer
Theory, Practice, Activism
Edited by Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl
29 Translating Foreign Otherness
Cross-Cultural Anxiety in Modern China
Yifeng Sun
Translating Foreign
Otherness
Cross-Cultural Anxiety in Modern China
Yifeng Sun
First published 2018
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© 2018 Yifeng Sun
The right of Yifeng Sun to be identified as author of this work has
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: translation in China 1
1 Translation and cross-cultural anxiety 8
2 Authenticating translation 28
3 Diaspora and foreignizing translation 49
4 (Un)translatability and cross-cultural readability 69
5 Violence and translation discourse 90
6 Opening the cultural mind 108
7 Attitudes, feelings, and affective interactions 125
8 Translation in the age of glocalization 142
Conclusion 163
Index 169
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Duke University Press for granting the permission to use por-
tions of an article entitled “Opening the Cultural Mind: Translation and Modern
Chinese Literary Canon” published in Modern Language Quarterly.
I would also like to thank Springer for allowing me to reprint a revised version
of “Cross-Cultural Translation: Attitudes, Feelings and Affective Interactions”
published in Neohelican: Acta comparationis litterarum universarum.
Parts of Chapter 8 are based on an article published in ARIEL: A Review of
International English, and I am grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press
for permission to make use of some of the material.
Introduction
Translation in China
Translation in China has been entangled with foreign otherness. While its fresh-
ness of appeal provides much enlightenment, it is also a primordial source of
anxiety. This ambivalence is of critical significance to understanding the nature
of translation in the Chinese cultural-political context. And, a related range of
issues concerning translation practice needs to be contextualized and theorized
in relation to the interplay between foreign otherness and anxiety that has been
aroused. Misconceptions of foreign otherness may have exacerbated tensions and
dilemmas inevitably produced by the changing cultural landscape. The unnerving
presence of foreign otherness manifest through translation has haunted China
since the late Qing dynasty, when China started to embark on a long and ardu-
ous journey in search and pursuit of modernity. Since then, translation has been
inexorably linked to social development in modern Chinese history. Foreign oth-
erness is alienating and liberating in equal measure. This book seeks to demon-
strate that central to Chinese translation practice is a generalized cultural anxiety
about foreign otherness. It is thus meaningful to examine how foreign otherness,
though initially and thereafter from time to time perceived as desirable, leads to
suspicion and distrust and is also related to ideology inherent in translation.
Modern Chinese history has witnessed numerous social, political, and cultural
upheavals, and generations of intellectuals have turned to the West for enlight-
enment and inspiration. As is often the case, translation has served as both the
catalyst and conduit for stimulating cultural political changes in China. Mainly
as a result of translation, ethnocentric beliefs and feelings have gradually given
way to a more open and liberal way to explore and appropriate foreign otherness.
Meanwhile, people are still gripped by the fear of Westernization, perceived as
a threat to the Chinese cultural integrity and social stability. However, it can be
seen that through translation, a universalized and universalizing cultural language
reawakens and reinforces cultural identification. Translation activities are part of
local realities in relation to the global world of transnational cultures. Global
economic integration has enabled China to play an increasingly prominent role
in the world today, especially in economic and political terms, though clearly not
in cultural terms – a perennial source of frustration for many Chinese. With the
growing localized appropriation of globalized cultural information, more shared
or universal references are making it possible for Chinese translations of foreign,
especially Western texts, to be less hampered by cultural difference.
2 Introduction
For China, translations have been largely pragmatic necessities, as evinced by
two periods of impassioned translational activities that occurred in the late nine-
teenth century and the late twentieth century, both of which are in a multitude
of ways intertwined with ideology. Marxism was imported to China – via Rus-
sia – from the West through translation and retranslation, and then numerous
translations of other Western texts ensued to challenge or undermine, in almost
equal measure, the ideological centrality of Marxism in China. Historically, in
spite of the potential of Marxism, the period between the May Fourth Move-
ment and the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) was marked by a rich plurality
of ideologies (Wang 2003: 42). During the period spanning from the late Qing
dynasty to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, China was much pre-
occupied with national survival and salvation. Thus there were translations of,
either Western works to arouse the people with modern concepts to modernize
and revitalize China, or literature of “weak and small nations” including Poland,
Hungary, Finland, Spain, Turkey, and India, among others. All such nations
share the detritus of great civilizations whose broken-up quality was reminiscent
of the tragic and convoluted situation in China. Under the circumstances, the
Chinese cultural identity was not the paramount concern of the nation. Due
to the urgency of national salvation, there was little interest in searching for or
maintaining a cultural identity, and ideological differences were readily over-
looked from time to time.
Starting from 1950, issues of cultural politics began to play a pivotal role in
Chinese life with regard to ideological control once again. Marxism was taken
ever more seriously to serve the political needs of the Chinese Communist Party,
which, through its Central Compilation of Translation Bureau of Marxist and
Leninist Works established in 1953, institutionalized the translation of Marxism-
Leninism into Chinese. Ideological manipulation was manifestly embodied in
selections of texts for translation. Soviet and Russian literature was prioritized by
the Party in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively, even though the two communist
parties broke up in their ideological disputes, and the ensuing border conflict in
1969 brought the two countries to the brink of a full-scale war. By and large, the
supreme irony was that their ideological affinity remained intact. However, in the
1960s, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, Soviet literature became the
undesired other and, in an inherently paradoxical way, viewed to be ideologically
repugnant, although certain Soviet literary works were translated for the purpose
of “criticizing revisionism”.
The Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966, lasting for ten years, and unleashed
destructive powers not merely victimizing individuals, but tarnishing the cultural
identity of an entire nation. And it turned out to be culturally cataclysmic, with
translation getting its full blunt. Anything to do with traditional or Western cul-
tures was wantonly banned. For ordinary people, reading such banned texts was
tantamount to a criminal offense. On grounds of political prudence, even works
by Maksim Gorky, highly esteemed by the Chinese authorities, were banned at
the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. The translation of Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre, published in the 1950s and regarded as “progressive” at the time, was no
Introduction 3
longer ideologically acceptable by the time the Cultural Revolution started. For
a while, translation of foreign literature drew to a standstill, and over five years,
from May 1966 to November 1971, not a single translation of foreign literature
was published. Once again, China was estranged from the international cultural
community. However, in 1971, things began to improve when the rigid policy
was somewhat relaxed, and publication of foreign literary works resumed to a lim-
ited extent (Ma 2003: 65). An unusual form of publication of translation called
“internal circulation” began to develop, dating back to the late 1950s and culmi-
nating in the latter part of the Cultural Revolution. Such translated works were
restricted to officials at or above a certain level, as well as some researchers, but
then extended to ordinary intellectuals, but only to those who were from work-
ing class backgrounds. Not surprisingly, critical essays were routinely attached to
translations to serve as an ideological safeguard to “guide” the reading. This also
offers compelling evidence of anxiety about ideological corruption from foreign
sources and also about damaging insulation from the outside world.
As a consequence, immediately after the political cataclysm of the Cultural
Revolution came to an end in 1976, Chinese literary discourse was found to
be in a state of devastation. The enforced or benighted ideological uniformity
and the subsequent concomitant cultural homogeneity had practically precluded
innovation in art and literature. The hardheaded writings of the traumatic years
with a decidedly Marxist bent denoted that literature could not be divorced from
politics, and, furthermore, literature was under obligation to serve a political
need. Although there is nothing unusual about reading literature politically, the
tendency that the reader was expected to read everything politically and ahistori-
cally was no doubt detrimental to constructing a credible and meaningful mod-
ern literary discourse.
As noted earlier, well before the Sino-Soviet ideological disputes, which became
public in the mid-1960s, the Chinese had surrendered their collective ideologi-
cal autonomy to the so-called orthodox Marxist discourse shaped by the Soviet
Union.1 The Soviet model was ostensibly the desired other, taking over the whole
of Chinese cultural life. The profound irony was that even after the Sino-Soviet
rupture, and China overtly reinvented a political discourse, albeit not very suc-
cessfully, to establish and demonstrate its different ideological identity, its literary
discourse remained more or less unchanged. There was not even an attempt to
redefine the principles of socialist realism that had been proclaimed to be the offi-
cial aesthetic of the Soviet Union. No reconfiguration of China’s literary policy
was provided to displace the Soviet type of Marxist literary theory, and although
some attempts were made to criticize the “revisionist” literature, they appeared to
be theoretically insubstantial and haphazard. And despite the ideological barrier
between the two countries, China barely did anything to encourage ideological
innovation in literature and was still explicitly obsessed with the social role of lit-
erature, which culminated in the near extinction of novel writing at the height of
the Cultural Revolution, when China’s cultural system was virtually in collapse.2
To be sure, the Chinese literary discourse during the pre-culture fever period
up to the early 1980s was relatively crude and schematic. And meanwhile, the